Most Important Meal
by The Periodic Table of Converse
Summary: If there's ever a time when a family - or a team - is at its most chaotic point, it's the most important meal of the day, and the Avengers are no exception. Part of my 'the Superheroes in Stark Tower' universe. One-shot.


_**breakfast is the most important meal of the day.**_

"Mars?" Steve Rogers scoffs into his breakfast. Tony nods enthusiastically, the creamer loaded, nerve-racingly caffeinated cup of joe in his hand sloshing over the brim of his Iron Man mug and onto the floor. The billionaire remains unaware, gesturing wildly with his arms. Steve, on the other hand, eyes the slopped drink disdainfully, eyelids narrowed slightly. He sighs, a long and suffering exhale that is clearly asking the universe why Tony Stark has to be his problem today. Tony continues to prance gleefully around the room, and more of his drink ends up splashing to the cold tiled floor with every leap he takes.

"Aw, come on Stark," Steve chides, marking his page in his latest novel, _Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,_ which he's reading at the team's request. (He finds he thoroughly enjoys the series so far, and that he hates that pink-colored toad lady, Umbridge, more than he hates Lord Voldemort.)He closes his book so he can focus his disapproving captain's stare on the brunette man in full force. "You know what happens when you get coffee on the floor. Percy will end up slipping in it, and you know how much he complains about everything on Thursday mornings."

"Don't cry over spilt milk Capsicle. It's Mars!" Tony says. He pretends his hand is a space ship by sending it soaring high above the breakfast table, moving it back and forth in wide and sweeping loops. He makes _whooshing_ noises with his mouth, and dives two fingers into Steve's breakfast, which the blonde had been neglecting for Harry and Hermione and Ron. The soldier looks mournfully at what used to be a delicious and delectable meal for the day. Now he can see a trickle of motor oil dribbling down the berries to the plate below.

"Why all the excitement about Mars?" he questions cautiously, still eying his food.

"They're gonna try to colonize it! Haven't you heard? This is pretty big shit. They're having people sign up to go on a rocket and live there and never come back to Earth ever. Like the American colonists in the 1600s! That's a reference you understand, right? Anyways, I–" He makes a grab for Steve's ungodly healthy breakfast - a dish of washed strawberries and sliced bananas – and cleanly swipes it out from under Steve's nose. Tony ignores Steve's protests to leave the soldier's meal out of his demonstration, lifts it high in the air. "– will be there to watch them fail! Miserably! Ha-ha!"

"Give me back my fruit, Stark."

"No can do Captain, O my Captain." Tony waves the red mountain of fruit around wildly. Several berries drop to the floor. "What does this look like to you, Rogers?"

Steve's face is deadpan. "My breakfast."

Tony is unimpressed.

"Wrong!" he exclaims. "It's Mars! The red planet!" Tony scans the room, looking for a way to enhance the imagery of his stolen and – according to the monotone Rogers – mediocre diorama. Resting upon the kitchen island is a half-full canister of powdered sugar that Clint likes to coat his waffles in of Waffle Wednesdays. He cracks open the meshed lid, tosses it aside, and dumps the entirety of the canister's contents onto the dish.

Steve frowns. "Now it looks like the moon," he points out.

Tony is the one to scowl now. "The white represents the dust," he explains slowly, tone condescending.

"Then you should have used granulated sugar."

"Forget it. Besides, the moon isn't white, it's – never mind, doesn't matter. See this?" Tony puts his half-full mug of coffee down absentmindedly, another wave of brown liquid sloshing out of the mug and leaking out across the table. It soaks the corner of Steve's book before the soldier has a chance to move it out of the path of the drink. His loud protest of 'Hey!' goes unheard.

"This is a rocket ship from Earth." Tony waves his now free hand around as emphasis. "And this is how that rocket from Earth is going to fare on Mars." He makes one wide swoop and sends his stiff fingers diving straight into the mountain of strawberries. A cloud of white powder puffs up into the air, coating Tony's face and the front of his shirt in sticky moist sugar.

"It's going to crash?" Steve asks, a little horrified.

"No. But it's not gonna work. And you know why? Because who wants to leave all their technology – laptops, television, the internet – and fly out into space and never get to see their family or friends again? That's right, nobody in their sane mind."

"So why aren't you signing up?"

Tony levels Steve with a cocked-eyebrow, you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me look. He smiles innocently back. "Ha-ha, you're a riot. Real cute, ice pop. Have you no respect for my enhanced intelligence?"

"Not since you started stealing senior citizens' food for science demonstrations," Steve shoots back.

The billionaire applauds loudly, a sarcastic smile plastered across his face. His eyes remain unamused, crinkled under the weight of lowered, unimpressed eyebrows. "And he made a joke, guys. Woo hoo, keep it up and we might hear another one before the next decade rolls around. Way to go, grandpa."

"Play nice, boys," a woman's voice warns lowly. Tony and Steve, Mars forgotten and their quarrel on hiatus, whip their heads to see Natasha at the stovetop, calmly frying a massive pan of eggs and sausage links. From the browning meat and the firm looking yolks, it seems the spy has been working on breakfast for at least five minutes now.

"When did you get here?" Tony demands, eying Natasha's spatula like it might bite him. "And why aren't you using my other spatula?"

"The Iron Man one, complete with five different voice recordings of you and painted red and gold?" Steve cuts in incredulously. "Who would be caught dead using that monstrosity?" Tony whirls to cross his arms at Steve.

"Stay out of it, Rogers. You're just jealous because they didn't make one for you." He turns back around to face the assassin. "Now why aren't you – holy crap, where'd she go?!"

Natasha closes the refrigerator on the opposite side of the kitchen with a light thud. Balanced expertly in her hands is a plate of sliced butter; a gallon of 2% milk, which is the only kind Clint will drink; a loaf of bread Bruce picked up from the bakery down the street yesterday that's still pretty soft; and a pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice, no more than twelve hours old.

"I don't remember buying all this healthy food," Tony remarks as he watches Natasha gracefully set the mound of breakfast accessories down upon the countertop. Having been hidden behind the butter in his arms so that he didn't see it right away, he now spots a bowl of fruit salad and a Tupperware container of fat-free sliced ham. Steve hauls himself out of his chair to start loading bread into the industrial sized toaster eight slices at a time. Natasha throws the ham into the pan with the rest of the food. Tony remains where he is. "What, no bacon?"

Natasha stirs the protein portion of the team's meal absentmindedly with her right hand holding a regular, plain black spatula. With her left, she begins pulling glass plates out of the overhead cabinet. "You don't just buy some of this food, Stark," she tells him, holding up the hand-squeezed jug of juice.

"Bacon is unhealthy," Steve comments from where he is scooping spoonful's of orange slices, apple chunks, and purple grapes into bowls.

"It tastes like God's tears," Tony argues back, arms crossed. He props his feet up on the table, only to remove them due to a scathing glare Steve pins on him.

Natasha turns off the burner and lifts the pan off the heat. Swiftly, she begins scooping equal portions of meat and eggs onto each of the seven set plates. "You're an atheist, Stark," she reminds him. The pair casts a wary glance at the soldier placing a fork and a knife on top of a folded napkin next to each full plate resting on the counter.

Steve shrugs and slides past the slim redhead to pull out a tall stack of plastic cups from the cupboard.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Tony holds up his hands to halt the blonde's swift movements. "What the hell are those?" He points to the array of cups gathered up in the blonde's arms. Upon each one is a colorful symbol stitched out of thread and inserted in-between two plastic cups.

"They're TERVIS," Steve tells the two others in the kitchen with him, as Natasha is oblivious to the cup brand as well. "Look, they have one for each of us!"

Upon one of the cups Steve holds is a Technicolor red and white-webbed mask, with large black eyes. Another depicts a looping symbol etched onto the side of a grey hammer; a bright purple mask marked by a stark white 'H'; a glinting bronze sword with an intricately carved hilt and leather bound grip. Proudly, Steve holds aloft a cup bearing a red and gold faceplate with gleaming blue eye slots and a stern facial slit. "This one is yours," he says to Tony. With flourish, the captain fills the cup up with juice and passes it to the dumbstruck man.

Natasha moves swiftly over to where Steve is standing, and by random, plucks a cup from his arms. Its decal is an hourglass in a violent red shade, layered on a black circular background. She stares at the piece of dishware for a moment in silence, then jerks her head up to stare at Steve. He smiles back happily, and she sighs and fills her own cup before moving silently out into the hallway to wake Percy and Peter for school. The time reads 6:03. They're doing pretty good.

A silence settles over the two heroes in the kitchen, Steve from his spot at the stove where he commandeers the frying pan, and Tony sitting at the table, staring longingly at the Iron Man TERVIS next to Steve's arm.

"Would you bring that to me?" Tony finally asks after an agonizing moment of staring at it and wishing beyond all wishes that he possessed the force. It looks incredibly appetizing, especially considering his coffee is slopped all over the floor. And he _maybe_ had been up all night in the lab, drinking his way steadily through a bottle of scotch. Steve glances down at the chilled cup of juice, then back at the frying pan.

"But I'm making breakfast."

"You already ate breakfast," Tony points out.

"Which you stole and got motor oil in. And besides, this is for the team too."

"Ooh, so I get some?"

Steve sighs. "Tony, come get your drink and stop talking."

The billionaire frowns, but stands, and meanders over to pick up the beverage. He takes a sip indignantly, then pauses to stare into the orange liquid inside. "What the hell?" he says, then takes a bigger gulp and swallows it greedily.

"The magic of fresh food, Stark," Steve tells him. He stirs the meat and eggs around in the pan, and Tony watches, fascinated.

Tony agrees. "So, I get some of that, yeah super soldier?"

"Yeah Tony."

"Oh good. I haven't eaten in days." Stark goes back to his seat at the table and takes another swig of juice. "But it still would have been better with bacon."

"And it also would have been a lot less healthy," Steve says, but he's not denying it.

"If you're sure." Tony drinks some more juice.

"Sure 'bout w'at?" Percy slurs sleepily, stumbling into the kitchen, drawn forward only by the enticing smell of a hot breakfast. "Bacon?" He murmurs, eyelids shut.

"Unfortunately not," Tony informs the tired teenager with a forlorn voice. He wants to point out to Steve that even Percy wants bacon, but holds his tongue and says instead, "It's Thursday. You know what that means."

The entire team most certainly does know what Thursday means in terms of breakfast – that is, to say, Protein Thursday – which to the discontent of Clint, Tony, Percy and Peter, does not include bacon, and doesn't even make an alliteration, so it shouldn't even be a real thing in the Tower.

"Damn," Percy swears under his breath. "That means I have Ms. Nasty face today."

"Is that why you hate Thursdays so much?" Steve asks, surprised.

"No, Percy just likes to complain." Peter, as awake-looking as ever due to the fact that he used to get by sleeping only several hours a night, strolls into the kitchen with his already packed backpack slung over one shoulder. "Breakfast smells good, Steve," he compliments, kicking out his usual chair and sitting down.

"Natasha made it, tell her." Steve turns off the burner and begins doling out the array of food in size-appropriate portions onto each plate. Steve, Natasha, Clint and Bruce eat a lot more than Peter, Percy and Tony.

Percy drags himself over to the counter and goes to pick up his designated plate of food and a drink. He stops and stares at the arrangement of TERVIS cups set out next to the bowls of fruit. "What is this?" he manages to say without letting his sleeplessness leak into his voice.

"A TERVIS, Jackson," Tony remarks as though he hadn't just asked the same question a few moments ago.

"And why is Riptide on it?"

Steve grins excitedly. "Isn't it great? I found them at that Super Target a couple of days ago when you sent me out to buy poster board for your history project. I couldn't believe they actually had the full set, the worker told me they're pretty popular."

"Or maybe he pulled some strings because you're Captain America," Percy says around a mouthful of toast. Steve blinks at him in dawning comprehension. His lips drag down slowly.

"Oh." The blonde stiffens up, seemingly unwilling to move now that he knows the truth behind his amazing hypermarket find. Peter shoots Percy a dirty look over the rim of his own TERVIS and tries to console Steve.

"And you broke Cap," a familiar voice comments from the entrance to the kitchen, where a dirtied, dirty-blonde man with powerful arms leans against the doorway, coated in soot and torso wrapped in tight and stretchy gauze. He limps into the room and collapses into a barstool at the island, the thud of his battered body hitting the seat eliciting a sympathetic hiss from everyone in the room.

"I'm not broken," Steve protests airily, still staring at nothing.

Peter checks the clock over the oven. It's still only 6:21 in the morning, a time that seems almost ungodly to be awake during. It's only thanks to school that the two teenage heroes show their faces at all before 9:00 a.m. Tony usually only goes to bed at seven in the morning and sleeps until three. Natasha and Steve are always up by a quarter to six, Bruce won't be seen for at least nine more minutes, and Thor's waking schedule is about as consistent as the ocean. However, Clint is always strolling into the kitchen at 6:40 on the dot, always clean from a fresh hot shower, and never has Peter seen the archer break that schedule.

"Where have you been?" Tony asks in return, eyes lingering on the man's clearly strained body. Clint ignores him for a moment, popping what sounds like a set of swollen knuckles and cracking his neck.

"Texas," he says finally. Percy snickers into his breakfast, then goes red when the inured archer's stare lands on him.

Oblivious, Tony says, "You're kidding."

"He's not." A flash of scarlet red hair gives away the female assassin skulking through the shadowed corners of the room. Her stance is relaxed, proving she's been there for a while.

"How does she do that?" Tony announces thoughtfully to the room.

"–There was a band of international terrorists holding a meeting near Houston last night. He's only been gone for twelve hours at the most."

Clint rolls his sagging shoulders. "Yeah, and they were a real challenge." He snorts into a TERVIS of water that Natasha has pushed into his cut-riddled hands. "Thanks – what is this?" His wary gaze takes in the decal of a bright purple mask. "I don't even wear purple."

Peter groans. "Not you too!"

"Hate to break it to you, Hawkass," Tony tells him, "But you kind of do. Granted, it's not the brightest shade of purple there is, but it is a sort of subdued violet."

Steve has finally managed to shake off what shock has overcome him at the thought of receiving special privileges on the ground of buying dishware. "Since when do you know so much about colors?"

Before Tony can reply with a biting comment, a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Bruce Banner wanders into the kitchen, glasses perched firmly on his nose, his yellow shirt meticulously buttoned, not a hair out of place. Peter checks the clock again. Yep, 6:30 sharp. Meanwhile, Bruce smiles, bids them a calm good morning, and begins his day with the question, "So, what kind of riveting conversation are Steve and Tony having today, then?" His question elicits a round of indignant protests from the perpetrators and a couple of sniggers from the rest of the team.

"And here I thought it was Science Bros before hoes."

Natasha turns her sharp, emerald, cat-like stare on Tony's petulant expression. "What?" she asks lowly, dangerously. The billionaire gulps and stammers out a "K-k-kidding!" before fleeing the room.

She nods, satisfied.

"Did you have to go and scare him like that?" Bruce complains lightly. He collects his own breakfast from the counter and goes to sit down at the table when he stops and stares at the floor.

"What's wrong?" Clint questions in a low hiss, flexing his knees.

"What are you doing?" Bruce shoots back in response.

Bruce is not a morning person.

"I'm stiff," he trails off lamely.

"I'm sorry, that was mean…" Bruce says, and scrubs his face with his hands. "Are you okay?"

Clint shrugs. "Just sore. A couple bruises, a few scratches. Some pulled muscles. A bullet-wound in my abdomen." He gestures at the bandages.

The team members remaining in the kitchen look to him with varying degrees of wide eyes or raised eyebrows.

"I'll look at it right after breakfast," Bruce promises, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes again. "Now, why is there coffee on the ground?" he says. Interested, Percy glances up from his breakfast to stare at the large puddles of liquid caffeine trickling through the grout in-between the kitchen tiles.

"I do not know," Percy responds, at the same time Steve declares in a 'Well duh' tone, "Stark."

"Where _is_ Tony?" The teenage arachnid-based hero wonders aloud to his statistics homework he forgot to finish the night before. Immersed in his work, he had missed Tony's fleeing episode.

"He ran away, remember, because Natasha–"

A loud snore peels them from their musings. The billionaire in question is passed out on the ground underneath the kitchen table, drooling into the crook of his elbow. A suspicious stench of alcohol clings to his breath. The entire team stares at him, dumbfounded, Natasha and Clint included.

"How did he get down there?"

They blink simultaneously, share a look, because it's not every day you discover that drunk man-child genius billionaires are capable of acting like ninjas too. Then they go about their day as usual, because it may be weird, but they're the Avengers and the Avengers are the literal embodiment of weird.

Especially when there's a teenage genius with an I.Q. nearly sixty points over a hundred sitting at the kitchen table, doing math homework and causing the pencil he left on the counter to fly into his hand with the press of a button, or when a dark haired boy shoveling eggs into his mouth casually flicks his hand and watches in amusement as a stream of warm water snakes up from the floor and into the air, across the room and pours itself down the drain, leaving only small clumps of coffee grinds behind on the floor. And especially not when there's two assassins eating toast and discussing the weather and knives and a man with a destructive alter ego polishing his glasses and eating fruit slices one by one and a 95-year-old super soldier wearing a Captain America shirt and pajama pants in the kitchen.

Steve gets up to take a shower, and Bruce flips open a newspaper he has tucked under his arm. Percy and Peter pack up the backpacks and bundle themselves in coats to prepare for their respective treks to school. Natasha and Clint disappear to the gym, toast still in hand. Tony still snores away under the table, sleeping off what has most surely been at least two bottles of the good stuff, and probably three nights without rest.

And they all just have to smile to themselves, secretly, at this routine they've built and how close they've grown in the short time they've known each other. And yeah, breakfast is great, but it's when it's with the team that really makes it special.

**a/n: i am four days into summer vacay and I am already bored as fudge. please send in prompts or fic recommendations (no loki, no slash) or **_**something!**_

**a/n 2: i heart TERVIS so much. the ones in this story are made up, if they exist then that was completely by accident, but i have one of the avengers and i use it for everything**


End file.
